Walmart and Amazon are set to fight to the death.

With an all time high in unemployment and a lacking in income opportunities, ordinary Americans are buckling down and spending cheap, assuming they spend at all. Welcome to the titans clamoring over each other to get their paws on these gutted critters. Amazon versus Walmart.

Both are large and endured with savvy inventory practices, placing them in the position to offer the masses what they need: economic relief. Of course, as we enter the holiday season (another way of saying the shopping mindlessly season) the match is firmly on between these divine corporate monoliths looking to bring a cheer to your eye and another nickel to their padded coffers.

But this being an especially hideous time for most Americans, the gloves have come off with each price gouging each other in the hopes of keeping customer loyalty.

Writes the NY Times:

Last Wednesday, Wal-Mart dropped the price of an oven to $16, from $28, as part of its “Black Friday” deals. Later the same day, Amazon cut its price, which had also been $28, to $18.

Life could have stayed simple until Walmart CEO Raul Vasquez had to chime in:

…rhetoric from Wal-Mart itself has stoked the flames of rivalry. In an interview last week, Raul Vazquez, the president and chief executive of Walmart.com, asserted that the site was growing faster than Amazon’s; suggested that Amazon Prime, a two-day-shipping service that costs $80 a year, was too expensive; and said that it was “only a matter of time” before Wal-Mart dominated Web shopping.

In the end, we hope these two behemoths beat the crap out of each other, but our bet is that they are secretly colluding to beat the crap out of you.

About

I think the idea to start “Scallywag and Vagabond.” (SCV) originates from my myriad background and the many years I have spent in preferred cafes and brasseries extolling the virtues and subtle intricacies of ‘being’ as the Beaujolais ran, the cigarette wafted and the gentleman to my side pontificated while spraying himself with a deftly tied cravat and sun crested idolatry.’

I grew up in Australia where as a young man one was obliged to become a hero of sorts. A master swimmer, fighter of causes, ideals and disheveled denizen of aesthetics, and more often a carefree ‘larrikin’ who would occasionally poke his sun bronzed nose at authority and convention Read More